Beneath the Victorian terraces, the River Poddle still travels south to north through Harold's Cross, mostly out of sight. At the southern end of the district its course splits at a stone structure called the Tongue, or the Stone Boat - centuries old - which diverts part of the flow underground into the City Watercourse culvert, while the main channel runs through ponds and then dives beneath the streets between Mount Argus and Mount Jerome. The river then traces the boundary of the cemetery, including its Islamic plot, before vanishing again into a culvert at Greenmount and heading for the Grand Canal. The mills that once turned on the Poddle - a paper mill at Mount Argus, a flour mill by the cemetery gates, the Pim family's Greenmount Spinning Mill - drove much of the local economy through the nineteenth century. The water is still there. You just cannot see it most of the time.

Harold's Cross Green was where members of the Society of United Irishmen met to plan, and where rebels Thomas Cloney and Myles Byrne came to discuss tactics with their commander Robert Emmet before the rising of 1803. Emmet himself lived in a house in Harold's Cross during those months, partly because his sweetheart Sarah Curran lived just up the road at Rathfarnham. The rebellion failed quickly and disastrously, and Emmet was captured near here, tried, and executed by the British authorities. The Grand Canal bridge that links Harold's Cross Road and Clanbrassil Street now carries his name, with a plaque commemorating him. Decades later the Pearse family lived in the area; James Pearse cut stone for Mount Argus Church, and his sons Patrick and Willie came to that church for confession on the morning of the 1916 Easter Rising. They walked out into Dublin to start another rebellion.

Mount Jerome sits at the western edge of Harold's Cross like a quiet city of its own. Opened in 1836 by the Protestant Church of Ireland to counterbalance the year-old Glasnevin Cemetery on the north side, it was initially restricted to Protestant burials, then opened to Catholic interments, and now keeps a distinct Islamic plot just inside the entrance. The roll-call of the dead reads like a syllabus. Thomas Davis, the Young Irelander whose ballads stoked nationalism. George Russell, the poet and mystic who signed himself simply AE. Oscar Wilde's parents, William and Jane. The mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who scratched his quaternion formula into a Dublin bridge. The playwright J. M. Synge. Members of the Guinness family. Even Martin Cahill, the Dublin criminal known as the General, who robbed O'Connor's Jewellers on Harold's Cross Road in the 1980s, sleeps here. James Joyce mentions the place in Ulysses, and the cemetery's heavy Victorian Gothic still earns the reputation.

Dublin's first hospice opened in Harold's Cross in 1879, in a Georgian house called Our Lady's Mount that had previously been the Mother House of the Religious Sisters of Charity. Mary Aikenhead, founder of the Sisters of Charity, lived there from 1845 onwards, having outbid Mount Jerome Cemetery for the property when it came up for sale - the cemetery wanted the land, the sisters needed a community house, and the sisters won. Our Lady's Hospice still operates on the site, more than a century and a half later, providing palliative care to thousands of Dubliners. A few streets away, the order of St Clare arrived in 1804 to run a female orphanage; their school, Saint Clare's Convent Primary School, is now the oldest Catholic school in the Archdiocese of Dublin. The neighbourhood prefixes "Mount" to almost everything - Mount Argus, Mount Jerome, Mount Harold, Mount Tallant, Mount Drummond - a reminder that this was once high ground above the city, and that the houses up here had names before they had numbers.

Walk the redbrick terraces and you are walking Quaker history. The Pim brothers, Goodbody brothers and Webb family, all members of the Society of Friends, built houses, ran mills, and shaped the character of nineteenth-century Harold's Cross. James Pim earned the nickname Quaker father of Irish railways. The Webbs were abolitionists. Richard Allen, born in 1803 at No. 201 Harold's Cross Road, became a famous Quaker campaigner against slavery. The neighbourhood produced unexpected things in the twentieth century too: Joseph "Spud" Murphy set up his Tayto crisp production plant in Mount Tallant in the 1960s and there invented the Cheese and Onion crisp, an item now so embedded in Irish life that no Irish person under sixty remembers a world without it. The Battle of Trafalgar hero James Spratt was born here. The comedian Niall Toibin lived here. The uilleann piper Leo Rowsome, third in an unbroken line of pipers, was born here in 1903 and devoted his entire life to the instrument. Listen carefully on a quiet evening near Mount Argus and you can almost still hear the drones.